Through some constellation of events which are even now a complete mystery to me, I will be spending the next year of my life in a country full of people who routinely use words like "framtidsutsikter" and "otillfredsställande" in everyday conversation. Their laws are equitable, their police bored, their liquor nationalized, their language comedic, and their women busty. Their winters are colder than the ticket-taker's smile at the
Ivar theater on a Saturday night.
Ostensibly, I am going to study history. In reality, my feeble American brain is apparently so absurdly unworthy of the massive girth of their pedagogical techniques that they have assurred me I will be placed in something a little more my speed--something along the lines of an International Relations shortbus. Should I prove myself dextrous enough to tie my shoes and operate a pencil, I will most likely find myself clavicle deep in histories of the Swedish Empire, 1587-1623 and analyses of the Welfare State, 1947-1990 and so forth. None of which will count in the slightest towards my major.
Likewise, in theory I am going because it is a "wonderful opportunity." Since I intend to spend the vast majority of my life travelling on other people's money, it doesn't seem to me like the sort of once-in-a-lifetime thing all the normies seem to think it is.
No, in reality, I am going because of the four national pasttimes of Sweden, all of which I firmly support the proliferation of: spirits, sex, socialism, and suicide.
I leave in one week. At last, after a six-week duel with those rascally Swedes at the consulate in LA, my passport is being mailed home to me tomorrow, bearing a mighty Residence Permit, like the severed head of a fallen god. Every aspect is in place, every T dotted and I crossed, and it's starting to occur to me that
I have no idea where the hell my towel is. This is what I have with which to begin my year in the land of Vikings:
7 days worth of clothes, of increasing formality from jean shorts and wifebeaters to suits.
Branko Horvat's
The Political Economy of Socialism. (Don't roll your eyes till you've read it, Len. Then you'll roll your eyes and probably fling it out a window at a child just learning to walk.)
1 laptop, possessed of an evil spirit named Nylaratholoramalamatotep ever since I wiped its cognitive mind and resurrected it from its own ashes.
A Swedish-English dictionary, inexplicably missing the U section on the English side.
1 fedora; 1 Soviet-surplus
ushanka.
1 trench coat, elderly.
1 digital camera, for proof of the things that happen to me.
Some Marx, a fairly general book on current American affairs, the unabridged
Count of Monte Cristo, M. John Harrison's
The Centauri Device (for the literary nerd in me), and some China Mieville, who I still say is one of the greatest creative minds in fiction.
The following films: the Man with No Name Trilogy. Every Bruce Lee film
except "Enter the Dragon."
Casablanca. Dark City, Better Off Dead, The Machinist, Young Adam, Annie Hall.
A wacky and eclectic collection of about six gigs of music, mainly classical, rock, and randomness.
And that is all. That is the sum total of my material being for the next year. Further provisions (toiletries, sheets, pillows, towels, food, drink, etc) must be scavenged at the drop zone. There will be a solid twenty-four-plus hours of travel to get me there, and I will have to bribe a man to get in my
room by midnight, so I can be up (unshowered, unshaved, jetlagged to hell, and unfed) to start my first eight-hour day of intensive Swedish at 7 the next morning.
Really can't wait.
